celebrating the voice of feminism

Month: February 2016

“Where you were/ before you were born,/ and where you are/ when you’re not anymore/ might be very close.”

From “Future Perfect”

Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase); three previous collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil); and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash). A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for On Looking), she has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony.

Purpura’s poems and essays appear in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best American Essays 2011 and The Pushcart Anthology.

Lia Purpura is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in Baltimore, MD and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA. Recently, she has served as Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction, Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama’s MFA Program, Visiting Writer at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity at Eastman Conservatory, in Rochester, NY, and has taught at the MFA programs at Columbia University, Bennington, and at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and the Chautauqua Writers’ Conference. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.

nt Rachel is a writer and biologist. As a kid she got hooked on all things animal, vegetable, and mineral. To complicate matters, she was hatching up stories before she could hold a crayon. Once she discovered biology it was all over. Ever since her first class in 7th grade when she refused to dissect a frog, a little voice in her head said: You gotta share this amazing stuff about how nature works, and ask if we really need to harm it. The little voice only got fiercer once she went to college and worked with captive dolphins and Beluga whales, then got to see wild killer whales only a few weeks later. From then on it was an all-out quest to convey the wonders of nature, while pointing out the serious problems of our very bad habit of dominating others and the Earth. She’s been a card-carrying science writer for twenty years. The Blackfish Prophecy is Rachel’s first book.